Today's
verse is a particularly challenging one. It is not difficult to
translate, but it challenges our critical faculties. It seems to ask:
Well, are you a Buddhist, or not?

On the
surface, Chandaka is putting forward an analysis the acceptance of
which, for a devout Buddhist, is a no-brainer. The moon in Indian
thought, as everybody knows, is a symbol of mellow mildness. Candra,
indeed, is given in the dictionary as a
lovely or agreeable phenomenon of any kind. So
the moon is synonymous with loveliness, and certainly not a symbol of
fierceness. Similarly, the founder of the Buddhist religion, peace be
upon him, as everybody knows, was a human being without any faults.

Below the surface, Chandaka's words,
as I read them, are challenging a non-Buddhist, who has
confidence in the fierceness of the moon, to step forward and tell of
faults.

For
a non-Buddhist, who refuses to believe in Buddha but who rather
prefers to investigate for himself the meaning of non-buddha, the
mellowness of the moon is only the belief of ancient Indian human
beings, stemming largely from imbibing on hot Indian nights
intoxication libations prepared from the soma
plant. Though I have never been to the moon, I have strong
confidence, based on human reason, that if I were up there on a lunar
module and I stepped out onto the surface without a supply of oxygen,
I would find conditions up there extremely fierce, at least for a
minute or two.

In a simliar spirit of scepticism,
let us investigate whether or not there were faults in Gautama, who
in SN Canto 3, after he became the enlightened Buddha, Aśvaghoṣa
describes thus:

For the fathomless sea of faults, whose
water is falsity, where fish are cares, / And which is disturbed by
waves of anger, lust, and fear; he had crossed, and he took the world
across too. // SN3.14 //

Notice here that Aśvghoṣa does not
describe the human being who became Gautama Buddha as never having
had any faults in him. He rather suggests that whatever faults were
there, the Buddha had transcended.

In SN Canto 16 the Buddha himself tells
Nanda how faults are to be ended by the triad of śīla, samādhi, and
prajṅā, integrity, balance and wisdom:

Integrity no more
propagates the shoots of affliction than a bygone spring propagates
shoots from seeds. / The faults, as long as
a man's integrity is untainted, venture only timidly to attack his
mind. // SN16.34 // But balance casts off the
afflictions like a mountain casts off the mighty torrents of rivers.
/ The faults do not attack a man who is standing firm in balanced
stillness: like charmed snakes, they are spellbound. // 16.35 //
And wisdom destroys the faults without trace, as a mountain stream in
the monsoon destroys the trees on its banks. / Faults consumed by it
do not stand a chance, like trees in the fiery wake of a thunderbolt.
// SN16.36 //

These three verses do tend
to confirm, as a kind of negation of my non-Buddhist antithesis, that
the Buddha, as Aśvaghoṣa revered him, was indeed a man who was
speaking from his own experience of having ended faults.

A bit further on, however,
the Buddha tells Nanda:

So with regard to the truth of
suffering, see suffering as an illness; with regard to the faults,
see the faults as the cause of the illness; / With regard to the
truth of stopping, see stopping as freedom from disease; and with
regard to the truth of a path, see a path as a remedy.// SN16.41 // Comprehend, therefore, that suffering is doing;
witness the faults (avagaccha
doṣān) impelling it forward; /
Realise its stopping as non-doing; and know the path as a turning
back.// SS16.42 //

Avagaccha here is the imperative of
ava-√gam whose meanings include: come to, visit; go near; hit
upon, know, understand, assure one's self, be convinced. So when the
Buddha tells Nanda here to witness or know the faults, or to assure
himself of how the faults impel suffering forward, the Buddha as I
hear him is singing from the same hymn sheet as Marjory Barlow who
used to tell me so regularly, as her antidote to my trying to be
right, “Listen, love! In this work, being wrong is the best friend
we have got.”

On this basis, then, I have confidence
(I am as sure as eggs is eggs) that the prince Gautama, who after all
was a human being, was not devoid in himself of the faults which are
the raw material of practice – or “mind weeds” as Shunryu
Suzuki called them.

Having
already written the above, I was encouraged to think I might be on
the right track by reflecting on the irony that Aśvaghoṣa
concealed in the vocative expressiondoṣa-jña (O knower of faults!) – for how could anybody who had never had any
faults truly be a knower of faults? As a noun, doṣa-jña
is given in the dictionary as “physician” – one who knows the
faults (or diseases of the humours) in others. Hence EBC translated
doṣa-jña in today's verse as “O physican of faults!”

Since
1999 I have worked in a small way as a physician of faults, helping
children and adults, but mainly children, to overcome faults in the
vestibular system. I was led into that line of work as a result of a
very slow process of becoming aware of faults in my own vestibular
system, guided in particular by the late Ray Evans, the head of
training at the Alexander school where I trained.

One
of the great things about training to teach the Alexander Technique
is that the trainee teacher cannot help but see that everything
starts with work on the self, and that means doṣajña, knowing the
faults, or “knowing what is evil or to be avoided” [MW].

On
reflection, then, today's verse is not so challenging after all. When
we stop and think about it, the irony in it is obvious – except to
those who think that Aśvaghoṣa was a proselytizer of the Buddhist religion. For
them today's verse might be totally impenetrable.